Question: How (for lack of a better word) drastic do the changes form Bestial Nature have to be? Could, for example, the addition of tiny wings to the feet or fins along the forearm count, or must it be a jackal head or fish tail? Also, does the bonus still apply if I shapeshift into another form?
Hmm, semantics! I know you guys get tired of us saying it, but this is another place where different Storytellers will probably rule differently. Animal's always kind of a per-ST-basis purview, and I can't imagine that there's much more consensus over what different features for Bestial Nature can be.
Our guidelines for Bestial Nature (and Animal Feature, for that matter) are that they must always be features that a creature has, and must always be worn approximately the same way that creature wears them. We therefore wouldn't allow tiny wings on the feet; we'd want someone who took wings as a feature to have wings that were proportionately large enough for their body and located in the right general area (arms or back). Fins along the arms would be okay, however, since many kinds of fish do have similar fins. A jackal's head is totally fine, provided it is actually your head and not weirdly growing out of your side or something; giant amalgams like that are part of Bestial Nature's near-permanent transformational powers and are totally groovy. It's worth noting here that we wouldn't allow that for Animal Feature, however, which we would want confined more to small, individual parts - for that we'd say that a jackal head is really several features rolled into one, so we'd instead prefer they took a jackal's ears or jaws or fur or any number of other features rather than trying for a combo package (and hey, if you have a few of those, you've basically got a jackal's head anyway).
Most of the crazier stuff out there - wings on feet, extra limbs, teeth in vaginas and so forth - would fall under the Appearance knack Unusual Alteration, which allows a Scion to do basically whatever she wants with her permanent appearance. Of course, those changes won't have the bonuses of Bestial Nature, but you probably wouldn't want to sink that much permanent Willpower into making yourself look fancy anyway. Better to use BN for the bonuses and UA for everything it doesn't cover.
As for shapeshifting, there are two ways of handling it we'd recommend. The first is that whatever form you shapeshift into, the Bestial Nature features remain; if you're a dude with jaguar claws, you could shapeshift into a woman with jaguar claws or a bird with jaguar claws or a baby seal with jaguar claws, but the claws would always be there. Alternatively, you could shapeshift your BN features away, but while they were gone you would get no benefit from them; if you used your powers of malleable appearance to make your wasp wings go away, you would no longer have that sweet bonus to Sky until you let them back out. We prefer the second solution, since it gives Scions the flexibility to change fully if they want to and allows them to more easily try to disguise or image change as they need to, but there is something to be said for the very mythic idea of a god being so strongly aligned with an animal that it shines through no matter what form he takes, so we could see the first method being used in neat ways as well.
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